Friday, May 29, 2015

The Parent Company

The eyeless man has seen eternity. The devil is a bean counter, a placeholder for ghosts. The Yuggothian Ambassador lands at midnight. She’s dancing to the music inside her head, but no one else can hear it. People are not their shadows, not entirely. The kids gassed in the nursery of the satellite station. The molecular bond fits the flap to the envelope like a key, a signet ring left behind at the scene of the crime. There is a rumor going around that all the entities are one, but the owners are untraceable. A message to the parent company, if only you could locate the home office. An apartment in Paris. A condominium in New Jersey. A decaying manor home in Scotland. This one operates a bank out of the car trunk of an antique convertible. Mobile banking he calls it. Encrypted digital transfers through a Luna shell. Cash pouches. A bloodless secretary with track marks on her neck passed out in the front seat. When pressed he’ll admit to a mailing address somewhere in the greater Empire of Uruguay, but nothing more. “Perfect security is a pine box six feet underground,” she tells him, as she spools in to steal a few more lives, a few more hours of her fix. Her pale white skin glistens with sweat as he makes love to her slowly in the back seat, under the broken streetlights, under the stars.